With the Commonwealth Games nearly over, Glasgow weighs its legacy

The council rates the Games as an economic and social triumph but not everyone is sure of the benefit to the city's East End

Cathy McMillan with her grandson Barry Hanlon, looking onto the security entrance for the Commonwealth Games village: 'A workman told me they were building two rows of houses. He said: "You don't look very pleased about it."' Photograph: Tom Jenkins for the Guardian
Tom Jenkins/Guardian

It is a grey, breezy morning in Dalmarnock, and Cathy McMillan is leaning on her back wall in her dressing gown, having a cup of black coffee and a Kit Kat and watching the world go by. From her vantage point on Springfield Road, McMillan used to be able to look towards a tenement block and a handful of local shops – a grocer's, an off-licence, a small cafe.

All that was flattened several years ago. Her immediate view this morning is of a busy parking area for dozens of coaches and a large security tent screening vehicles entering the Commonwealth Games athletes' village.

What is going to be built there when the games are over? "A workman told me they were building two rows of houses," says McMillan, 80. "He said: 'You don't look very pleased about it.' I said: 'Would you look pleased if you had nae fucking shops?'"

As the Games draw to a close, the attentions of those in Glasgow's East End, where much of the sporting action has been concentrated, are inevitably turning to what happens next. No city bidding for a large-scale sporting event these days can neglect the question of legacy benefits and Glasgow has been no exception, promising the city's residents, and particularly those in its deprived and famously unhealthy East End, that the event would leave it a "prosperous, active, inclusive, accessible, greener place, with a greater international profile and outlook".

By the city council's own reckoning, even before the Games began they had been a triumph in economic and social terms. Construction of Games venues created 6,000 jobs and boosted the local economy by £52m, the council says. More people are taking part in sport and exercise, it adds, with greater numbers volunteering as coaches.

As for the event itself, which ends on Sunday, the Commonwealth Games Federation's Mike Hancock said on Friday he was running out of superlatives.

"It's very important that the investment that has been made here is not just [for the duration of] the event," he said. "In Glasgow, one of the biggest legacies we have seen is the human legacy. The people of Glasgow have really been inspired and have inspired us."

There is no shortage of evidence on that point. From the roaring, packed stands at almost every event to the estimated 500,000 who have joined in at free events around the city, Glasgow has a grin on its face and a spring in its step that delights those who have seen the city through greyer days.

"I never thought that Glasgow would turn out like this," says Robert Cavanagh, a Glaswegian who said he was "so proud" to be attending the event with a friend. The Games would transform the city's reputation, he felt, and would "lift the East End of Glasgow up".

Is he right? Can one mega-event really revive a part of Glasgow that has stubbornly resisted successive attempts at regeneration over decades? Dalmarnock has seen huge infrastructural investment in the runup to the Games, with tens of millions of pounds spent on a new railway station, a major road linking Glasgow's two urban motorways and a new pedestrian footbridge over the Clyde. Derelict houses have been demolished to make way for new property development and contaminated land has been cleared in an attempt to attract business investors.

There are those who query how much expensive capital projects benefit the communities they are constructed alongside, however. The shiny new £113m Sir Chris Hoy velodrome half a mile from McMillan's front door might look impressive "but when you hear people talking, what comes across is how they feel completely ignored", says Susan Fitzpatrick, an academic specialising in urban geography and a member of Games Monitor, a research and campaigning group that aims to question the ambitious claims made for Glasgow 2014's transformative social legacy.

She argues that the main beneficiaries of the millions spent from the public purse on roads and decontamination will be developers building homes and hotels on the newly cleared land. The houses and shops that McMillan misses, on the other hand, might have been poor quality and largely derelict, but they were the only services that the local population had.

The group cites the case of the Accord centre, a day centre for adults with learning difficulties which once occupied a former school off Springfield Road, before being flattened to make way for the athletes' village coach park.

Grace Harrigan's son Craig Anderson was one of those who attended the centre daily before it closed two years ago. Anderson, who is 28 and has Down's syndrome, got a place at a smaller local centre for those with particularly profound needs, but Harrigan, who weeps when talking about her experiences, says the new arrangements limit his interaction with those with a range of abilities. She argues the changes are driven by budget cuts rather than concern for her son's welfare. She blames the council, but believes the centre was closed because of the Games.

A Glasgow city council spokesman said the centre was selected for closure in part because it sat on land needed for the event, but the decision was driven by a wider modernisation of day care services, with the aim of integrating users into the community instead of basing them in day centres. Was that driven in part by budget cuts? "The personalisation of services was understood to be able to provide a more efficient service."

Can Harrigan see any benefit? "I've been told by a councillor that the legacy for the East End is the velodrome, but most people can't afford to use it. They spent loads on flowers to pretty up the areas. I don't see anything for the ordinary people."

Advertising the new houses to be built in Dalmarnock. Photograph: Tom Jenkins for the Guardian Tom Jenkins/Guardian

George Redmond, the local Labour councillor, grew up in Dalmarnock as one of six children in a house with an outside toilet. It is, he says, "one of the proudest times of my life" to see supporters dressed in team colours getting off the train at the local station.

As the vice chair of Clyde Gateway, the urban regeneration company in charge of the 25-year redevelopment of the East End, he is a passionate advocate of the steps that have been taken to renew this part of Glasgow. He recognises, however, that mistakes have been made in persuading local people, alienated over decades from having little say in their own environment, that the investment will bring them any benefit. Ten thousand new homes and 20,000 jobs are promised to the area as a result of the Clyde Gateway project, of which the Games are a key part.

The measure of a successful Games, he says, "is that we've got the appropriate amenities in Dalmarnock, schools, good retail, decent businesses that people get the opportunity to go to work for, houses that are a mix of new people and indigenous Dalmarnock people. It's about people having the pride again to say they come from Dalmarnock.

A jog from Bolt

Some people had wondered if he would get booed. As if.

When Usain Bolt finally slipped into Hampden Park shortly before 9.40pm on Friday night, it was not to catcalls but to an enormous roar that began with a jolt of recognition in one corner of the stadium and rapidly swelled to fill the entire stadium.

Usain Bolt poses when his name is announced shortly before the men's 4x100m relay. Photograph: Tom Jenkins

Two days after the Jamaican was quoted in the Times describing the city's Commonwealth Games as "a bit shit", Glasgow had decided either that it disbelieved the report (Bolt denies saying the words) or, more likely, that it didn't give a monkey's what he did or didn't say. He was here, wasn't he?

Jamaica comfortably won the 4x100m relay heat, with Bolt easing over the line on the anchor leg in what looked like a jog.Mobbed by reporters after the race, while Clydesider volunteers and even adjudicating officials hovered to take snaps on their phones, Bolt said afterwards it had been a "rough" couple of days, but insisted he had never had concerns about his reception from the Glasgow crowd.

"I was never worried, because I know my true people know I would never say something like that. I always go to every country with an open mind to see what they represent and to enjoy it and understand the culture." The Glasgow people, he said, "have been wonderful to me". On Saturday he'll contest the final and attempt, for a change, to make the headlines for his sporting achievements.